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If Greg Brown were a painter, you wouldn't find his art hanging in the Louvre.

They probably wouldn't be exhibited in New York's Museum of Modern Art, or the Knoxville Museum of Art, or any of the traditional places where fine paintings are displayed.

Brown's work is the equivalent of the quaint little paintings hanging slightly crooked on the nicotine-stained wall of a roadside diner somewhere along America's backroads, slightly dusty, tagged with a yellowing price sticker. They're little treasures that go unnoticed by the masses, because they're not filled with grand details that define life and death and everything in between.

They're little portraits of the mundane and the everyday; the rough-and-tumble details of life that, on the surface, seem to be simplistic. But those details are what make his art so breathtaking, because Brown has an eye for the things that most people never even notice. They're the gestures, the looks, the snapshots of the human heart, and Brown notices them in a way that only a few singer-songwriters do.

"I think it's the way my mind has always worked in terms of finding meaning in this deal that we're in here," Brown told The Daily Times this week. "When I remember things, it's like I would think about things that were very specific to me, because that's where the meaning is — that gesture, or the way the light is on a certain day, or the way someone lifts their shoulder.

"That's what I think about. When you try to pin life down and make some sort of statement about it, it usually doesn't work for me. I wrote a song about the assassination of President Kennedy called ''64 Dodge,' and I never mentioned the assassination, but you feel it through the song and how everything is about to change. It's those certain details that will say a lot without trying to say too much.

"That's the way I feel things and see things," he added. "The times I try to write in a different way and make a bigger statement, I'm never satisfied with it."

A native of Iowa, Brown migrated to New York as a teenager, where he quickly organized songwriter roundtables at the legendary Gerdes Folk City club. He didn't stay put for long, however, and a year later he moved West to Portland, Ore., Los Angeles and Las Vegas. After a few years writing songs for others, the highway called again, and he hit the road with a band before moving back to Iowa and started playing the club and coffeehouse scene.

In the 1980s, he established a reputation as a consummate songwriter through recurring performances on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" radio show. With a methodical, languid guitar style anchored in country, blues and rock, he's penned a number of Grammy-nominated songs and albums over the years.

"You know, the way songs work with me is that it's a very subconscious process," Brown said. "I'm working when I don't know I'm working, because I'm noticing things and hearing things. And when the actual songwriting happens, it's like being in a trance. I get to that place where I can get past my mind, beyond the place where I'm thinking, 'Should this go there,' and I get to a place where the song is writing itself, really.

"I don't have any method that I'm aware of, other than I just try to be a good receiver. One thing I notice when I'm writing songs is that I'm very open. I'm noticing things in a way I usually don't. I've heard athletes talk about being in the zone, where they're doing what they do best and they're not even aware of it. Writing is like that for me, but to get in the zone, you've got to be ready.

"I'm always singing and playing and listening, and I'm trying to get better at the craft part of it as much as I can," he added. "When this thing happens, you're either outside of yourself or you're all the way in."

For Brown, the key is in taking the external and internalizing it. He's a watcher, a songwriter who stitches together life's little moments that most people miss altogether into songs that seem profound in their own understated ways. And his ability to do that hasn't gone unnoticed — in addition to numerous nominations and awards (including two from the National Association of Independent Record Distributors), his albums have received rave reviews (Rolling Stone gave his 1996 record "Further In" four stars and called Brown "a wickedly sharp observer of the human condition") and his songs have been covered by Willie Nelson, Carlos Santana, Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ani DiFranco and Joan Baez, among others.

It's not a stretch to declare that, given his talent, it's a shame Brown has been more embraced by mainstream music fans. Not that he's bitter about it. In fact, Brown has his own theories about popular music these days.

"Popular music always reflects its time," he said. "If you listen to country music, it doesn't really reflect a country life like it did up through George Jones and Merle Haggard. That life is pretty much gone. Coming from a farm state like Iowa, I can tell you that the corporations have seeped into everything, even farming. The life people live has more to do with the mall than the back 40, and country music — as bland and soulless as it is, unfortunately — reflects that life and the way people live it.

"There's a reason music like that catches on. Music still retains its power, and it always will; those old hill tunes I grew up with are just packed with life and power. But the life itself is gone. The life we're living now, for the most part, is much more soulless. These days, people get their stories from TV, not from their neighbors."

The story is what Brown seeks to tell. Whether he's performing with his wife, fellow singer-songwriter Iris DeMent (who performs later this year at The Bijou Theatre in downtown Knoxville, where Brown will play on Thursday), or listening to the songwriters whose works have had a profound impact on his own, it's the story that Brown yearns to hear and longs to tell.

And it's up to those who listen to make sense of it. Like the nondescript painting at that imaginary roadside diner, Brown's songs are dusty and worn but filled with a history and power that takes a little effort to get into. If that effort is made, however, then what remains is an undiscovered gem that reflects the life going on around and within it.